Very Large Men or

the Unbearable Lightness of the Post Industrial World

Allegedly, a giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan and John Henry are American folk heroes who represent superhuman strength and size. I was corrected by readers who took me to task about Bunyan. John Henry is actually the giant man of giant strength who was matched against a machine. Paul Bunyan was a working class hero invented by lumberjacks for lumberjacks and an anti-environmentalist, but mostly he was a fictional character in a tall tale that workers logging the Upper Midwest of the early 20th century told each other to make their lives a bit more fun.

Like other Giants, not from New York, Paul Bunyan is an anachronistic figure, a man not for our times. In Homer’s epic, the giants, the Cyclops were already on the losing side of Greek myth, outfoxed by the much smaller and more cunning Odysseus. Brute force and one eye were not enough to defeat a man who wanted represented the seafaring cunning of a new generation of Greeks. The Cyclops were cloddish shepherds who literally lived in caves.

The Iron Claw features a family of cursed giants who fight for our entertainment. There is something tragic about very large men. They represent atavistic values from another even pre-agricultural era, when physical strength was necessary to protect fragile human communities from predators and other natural adversaries.

Beginning in the industrial age, small bodies, small fingers and small movements proved more critical to servicing machines and Taylorized processes of production.

Recently, our heroes are shrinking before our eyes: the members of BTS are ridiculously well groomed and slim. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is a slip of a man who made the most powerful weapon human beings had ever seen. Only Steve Jobs may have been less physically imposing and more politically and culturally important for twentieth century history.

The big man is always out. Except when it comes to the NFL, when giants emerge to entertain the masses hungry for catharsis. Nowhere was the contrast between the carnivalesque carnality of the Big Man more obvious than in the Kansas City Chiefs’ player box.

With hands as big as baseball mitts, Jason Kelce is our Gargantua. A monster of happiness and appetite, Jason Kelce swallows a can of beer in his hand. His physical excess is joyful, but also horrible. His brother’s girlfriend, the adorable billionaire, Taylor Swift is the pop star without a hair out of place. Jason’s wife told him to behave because he was meeting Swift for the first time, but when his brother Travis scored a touchdown, he couldn’t help buy take off his shirt.

Big Men hardly seem human. They’re too big. We don’t need men to be this big any more. We haven’t needed them to be this big in a long time. Our enemies cannot be defeated by brawn. The wolves have been kept at bay.

And yet Big Men still exist, eating the sins of their thinner, slighter, more feminine compatriots. In an era of Barbie feminism, feminist elites still wants us to believe that sexism holds women back from realizing their girlish dreams.

Upper middle class, college educated women work hand in glove with their masters of the universe husbands to promote the postindustrial ideal of a weightless, frictionless world, one where Ozempic is putting the Upper East Side grocery stores out of business.

Giants remind us of the weight of the past, even as they fall harder than we do into the abyss of the present.